Windows 7.0 Beta-Looking good

Little more than a year back I got my 64-bit desktop with Vista x64 and TV Tuner card connected to Tata Sky DTH in my office. Since the support for Pinnacle was not complete in Vista x64 I couldn’t get it working with Windows Media Center and had to resort to Nero Home for watching TV programs. About a week back I downloaded the latest beta bits of Windows 7.0 and the installation went very well. Almost all the drivers installed correctly and the few that had problems could be corrected easily (details after few paragraphs below).

The Pinnacle USB PCTV 330e had an inbuilt driver in Windows 7 for x64 and Windows Media Center recognized it easily. After few trials of positioning the Infrared transmitter in front of Tata Sky set top box and few rounds of learnings of the Infrared code of Tata Sky remote control by Windows Media Center, everything was working fine. I was able to change channels from Keyboard/Mouse/Media Center remote and Tata Sky set top box responded correspondingly (there was a trick to set the remote code transmission speed to Medium, Tata Sky uses 3 digits numbers for Channels). You can see the successful recordings I made below. The Microsoft PlayReady Runtime and Electronic Program Guide (EPG) didn’t work (may be because I was in India) and you need to skip them.

HP Photosmart 6188 – The default HP driver refused to install in Windows 7. I right-clicked on the setup file and selected compatibility and set it to Windows Vista. Then it installed properly – seemed to be a simple bug in HP program for Windows OS version detection.

PDF Conversion: I have been a long time user of CutePDF to convert documents to PDF effortlessly. How much ever I tried I couldn’t get it installed in Windows 7.0, so I moved to Primo PDF – which was recommended by my IT Pro team, which got installed perfectly in Windows 7.

Antivirus – Our office uses Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition which didn’t get deployed in Windows 7, so I tried my good friend’s K7 Antivirus 7.0 from K7 Computing. This got installed and is working fine in Windows 7.